Pretty much, it makes absolutely no sense. Unless the system is designed to throw all of its power at the games, so it has none left over for auxiliary systems (in game browsers, recording software or voip) and the system was already relatively cheap so allocating resources would deeply effect gameplay.

That or making an artificial barrier to keep children out of voice communications, so that they can maintain this family friendly identity.

Kids tend to have mobile phones these days and both the PS4 and Xbox One multiplayer experiences, both of which require a dearer subscription, are rife with children cracking wise about how lovely other people's mums are.

So then what is a possible explanation for going with this setup? Finally adding voice chat as a feature of the Switch's online service and yet removing the inbuilt microphone that was present in the Wii U, 3DS and DS (yet hardly ever utilised) before it.

Yes, but neither of the other platforms were;
A) Designed with Japan being the main demographic (Nintendo always does this)
B) Designed as handheld devices. They can call them consoles all they want, but they were very clearly designed with mobility in mind.

Pretty sure Nintendo have shown that they actively try to keep children from interacting with strangers (friend codes and bare bones communication systems).

Make up crap? It does look stupid as fuck and my statement is clearly inline with Nintendo practices even in place today.

Nah, still doesn't work unless you're running off the premise that Japanese kids don't have mobile phones and subscription services don't exist over there.

Portability only becomes a factor if you assume players will be online outside of their home. That's not often the case; people play online at home, therefore portability doesn't matter with regard to communication.

The setup is cumbersome and does look stupid as hell, but that's not in support of the statement that "it's also clearly designed to segregate kids from adults by needing a phone and subscription." - the part that is made up crap.

I see lots of people jumping to the conclusion that this is just Nintendo being ass-backward or anti-consumer, but what if it's a limitation of the hardware? Something that would have made the machine more expensive if built in?

It is a limitation of the hardware, yes - but only because they didn't put a microphone or mic port in there.

Microphones cost crap-all, and three of the last four systems they've shipped have come with them inbuilt (Wii being the only exception - and remember how well Wii Speak turned out?), and while they went mostly unused in terms of voice communications, they did still get used for that very purpose. I don't see how there's any other conclusion to arrive at.

Just because it might support low throughput controllers, does not mean it supports head sets, it could just be a real cheap and nasty bluetooth receiver. I am pretty sure that if it were an option it then there would already be aftermarket bluetooth headphones on the market, however the only ones I could find were clearly a scam (had nintendo branding in some really dodgy looking packaging).

Mobile phones and "phones that are compatible with this app they're trying to push" are not the same thing.

At the very least they should be making a PC version of this stupid app. Now those are ubiquitous. Except there's no need because everyone's already using an existing PC(/phone) app instead. IE they're pointlessly reinventing the wheels on the trailer instead of just putting them in the vehicle to begin with.

Well, for playing any game where you want to mix the voice chat audio with the game audio. The Plantronics headset I won from Zangief does this already, except it's got about a 2m cable on it and takes USB power to be able to amplify the signals as well.

These look so uncomfortable to wear unless you're a child they are way to small around the ears. I tried to use some that were this size last night. They came free with some Lynx deodorant bundle and they made my ears sore so I put them back in the box and back into the drawer of unused deodorant/show gel Xmas presents. Don't buy these unless you have abnormally small kids ears.

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